Ada, the National College for Digital Skills, celebrates World Skills Day

Ada (@AdaCollege), the National College for Digital Skills’, Sixth Form have marked World Youth Skills Day with the culmination of their end of year ‘AI Hackathon’ project in partnership with professional services firm Deloitte. 

 

Year 12 students were tasked with improving the student experience at Ada using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Teams attended workshops delivered by Deloitte volunteers, learning skills in project management, visual design, proposition design, business case development and product development. 

 

The winning team designed a program called ‘Coddex’ – an autocorrect tool for coders and programmers which makes sense of coding language and explains it in a way users can understand it. Judges from Deloitte, Ada and AWS were really impressed by the product itself as well as how the team communicated the problem and how Coddex would tackle it.

 

As part of a host of events for World Youth Skills Day, Ada’s annual infographics project tasked students with identifying a pressing social, environmental or cultural issue of interest to Londoners, supported by rigorous statistical analysis of a large data set in Python, and communicated through a visually compelling infographic. 

 

Teams worked independently and remotely against an unforgiving timescale and, as usual, they amazed the volunteer judges with the quality and originality of their work, looking in depth at issues like mental health and the economic effects of covid. 

 

Projects such as these give students the opportunity to develop their digital skills as well as presentation and project management skills, giving them the edge when it comes to writing applications and in job interviews and helping them to get a head start on a career in tech.

 

Ada Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Mark Smith said:

“At Ada, we are on a mission to educate and empower the next generation of diverse digital talent. Approximately 600,000 of tech jobs go unfilled every year due to a gap in digital trained workers, this shortfall must be closed. 

“As careers change, we must help today’s students prepare to enter the job market. That is why we pride ourselves on not only delivering courses but also meaningful digital careers – projects like the ones we host with Deloitte and Bank of America give our talented students an invaluable insight to the skills needed to gain employment.

“A number of our students go on to our Ada Apprenticeships and I am proud to say that at present we have more than 200 apprentices working in over 45 top companies. I along with everyone at Ada are committed to growing this number year on year.”